


War Crimes

by rangerhitomi



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
Genre: Fusion War, Gen, War Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-10
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-22 04:27:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3714997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rangerhitomi/pseuds/rangerhitomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shun may be Reiji Akaba's prisoner, but he will never give Akaba the satisfaction of showing how much damage the war has done to his mind and soul.</p>
            </blockquote>





	War Crimes

He’s aware of Reiji Akaba watching him across the table, but he keeps his head down and focuses on his soup. It’s been so long since he held an eating utensil that the spoon feels awkward in his grip. He’s being selfish, eating hot food like this without bringing any back to the others. There’s salt in it. He feels even guiltier for using a precious commodity to flavor food that is already more than palatable.

There’s a sound of a door slamming shut, and his entire body tenses; the spoon falls into the soup bowl, splattering hot broth all over the table, and his hand is halfway to his waist for his deck before he realizes _I’m not wearing my duel disk._

 _Stupid_! It’s always on his arm, even when he sleeps, when he eats, because the Fusionists don’t take breaks hunting them down—

No, he’s at LDS. It was just Akaba’s stooge shutting the door on his way out.

“Kurosaki?”

Akaba watches him over tented hands, curious, as though he’s a scientist watching a lab rat navigating a maze for its cheese. Maybe that’s what he is to Akaba. A curiosity. An experiment. A rat running in circles for the cheese that’s always out of its reach.

He tries to slow his heartbeat, tries to clear his face of expression.

“Is something the matter?”

(He’s clearly unsuccessful.)

“Nothing.” Shun has half a mind to get up and leave the room, return to the too-big, too-hot dormitory that Akaba assigned him and lock the door and smash something, but the thought of leaving a hot bowl of good food uneaten hurts him more than his pride taking a hit.

He picks up the bowl and drains it in three gulps. It burns his tongue and his throat and his chest but it’s the best food he’s had in years. Three gulps of it. He could have shared it with Ruri and Yuto.

It’s been a while since any of them have been able to down a liquid without gagging.

The bowl slams on the table, and he’s on his feet before Akaba calls him back.

“Kurosaki.”

He ignores Akaba and opens the door.

Or tries to.

“This room is designed as a holding room,” Akaba says calmly. “Locked from the outside.”

His adrenaline spikes, his heart races again; he’s trapped, he’s _trapped,_ he’s been captured by Academia. It was a trick all this time, wasn’t it? Reiji Akaba tricked him into coming along willingly because he _knew_ that Shun Kurosaki would never allow himself to be captured any other way.

 _Goddamn it._ His duel disk. They probably took it, to see how he carded people. How to uncard them, if that was possible. If Shun knew, he would have done it a long time ago. He had too many dead comrades not to explore that possibility. But maybe LDS, with all its technology and time, in its shiny building with well-fed, clean, trained scientists, could find something where the desperate, starving middle and high school children with a rudimentary science and mathematics background could not.

He pulls at the door, harder.

“It’s not going to open,” and Shun turns just in time to see Akaba sipping his tea. The sight of it pisses him off, inexplicably. 

“Let me out.”

“No.”

They stare at one another for a long moment. Akaba sets down his cup, leans back, rests his chin on his folded hands.

“I have my team looking at your duel disk,” Akaba says, and Shun grinds his teeth. “We’re trying to figure out what you did with Professor Marco and the others, and how to reverse it. Unless you’d care to tell us.”

Shun slams a fist into the door. It would probably hurt, later, but he doesn’t notice anything but his blind fury at that moment. “Do you think I _know_?” he hisses; does Reiji Akaba think that this godforsaken technology was something _he_ came up with, that the _Resistance_ was responsible for? “We could barely scrape by enough food to keep us alive, do you honestly think we would just sit around fiddling around with shit like that? Do you think we’re like _them_?”

“Seeing as you’re perfectly willing to employ the same techniques,” Akaba says matter-of-factly, “yes.”

Yuto’s voice, from a long time ago, echoes in his mind. _I duel… for the smiles. Don’t you, Shun?_

His legs carry him, unwillingly, back toward the table. He grabs Akaba by the front of his shirt and shakes him. Akaba doesn’t flinch. “How dare you… compare us to those _monsters_.” His voice is unsteady. “They invaded our home. They destroyed it. They killed everyone—“

“Didn’t you do the same?” Akaba’s cold eyes stare up into Shun’s, and it pisses Shun off that he’s… right. It was impossible to reason with the Fusionists; God knows they had tried.

Acquiring the Fusionists’ technology had been an accident. Yuto had returned from a mission, face ashen, mouth trembling, as he held out an unfamiliar duel disk. He wouldn’t say where it came from, but Shun could guess, from the way Yuto cried all night and wouldn’t even look at his deck and refused to eat his meager provisions for three days before Shun held him down while Ruri shoved the food into his mouth and forced him to swallow it.

He had been thirteen.

The same thing happened to Shun after his first time, too. It wasn’t a carding, because they hadn't figured out the technology yet. He’d crushed one of them under a falling pile of rubble. It might be possible, someday, somehow, to restore those who had been carded - at least, he prayed every night to the empty skies for some way to bring his friends back - but there was no way to restore a crushed body.

It got easier, after that. It got easier to tell himself, to tell Yuto, to tell Ruri, that it was all justified. It got easier to steel himself before battle, and before too long, he could go on a mission without spending the entire night before hunched over a bucket, throwing up from the nerves, physically sick at the thought of what might happen the next day. It got easier, revenge.

He wants to hit Akaba at that moment, but doesn’t. He lets go.

“Someone like you could never understand the hell that is war,” he whispers. “Sometimes you have to do things to protect the people you—“

No, he won’t show Akaba this part of him. He won’t give him the satisfaction.

He grinds his teeth together. “Let me out,” he says instead.

Akaba stands up, adjusts his scarf, walks past. He presses a button on the wall. “Please open the door,” he says, and there’s a soft _click_. He opens the door and gestures for Shun to leave.

“I’m only doing this for Ruri,” Shun says, “for Ruri and my hometown,” and maybe he’s trying to convince Leo Akaba’s son that his war crimes were justified, but maybe he should try to convince himself first.


End file.
